Yeltsin Movement May Split; Radicals Want to Speed Reforms

The political movement that helped bring Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to power a year ago is threatening to split, with its radicals accusing Yeltsin of failing to carry out the deep reforms he promised.

Radical members of Democratic Russia, which organized Yeltsin’s election triumph in June, 1991, and backed him in the streets during the putsch by hard-line Communists last August, said at a weekend conference that they increasingly find themselves in opposition to his government, believing it must move faster and more boldly in its reforms.

Marina Salye, chairwoman of the conference, said the radical wing of Democratic Russia wants to support Yeltsin from the left and thus offset what it sees as the conservative tendencies growing within his government and more broadly in Russian society.

“The political situation in Russia is characterized by the establishment of a ‘right-wing’ opposition to the course of radical democratic transformation,” Salye declared.

The radicals criticized the Yeltsin government for what they see as its hesitant and even haphazard transition from a centrally planned economy based on state ownership to one where market forces and private entrepreneurship prevails.

They accused old Communist Party apparatchiks, now prominent officials in the Yeltsin government, of delaying the adoption of a democratic constitution because it would weaken their powers. Salye said election of a constitutional convention should become Democratic Russia’s main focus, though Yeltsin seems indifferent.

And the radicals charged Yeltsin’s appointees, both in the central government and at provincial levels, with being unwilling to tackle entrenched bureaucracies. They said the bureaucracies were openly undermining his most critical reforms, including the selloff of state enterprises, the development of private farming and the end of government subsidies to bankrupt enterprises.

“A year ago, we had dreams of change under Yeltsin,” Pyotr Danilov, a St. Petersburg activist, said, “but those are turning to nightmares of stagnation now. . . . How do we move forward?”

A split in Democratic Russia, a broad-based movement that now appears unlikely ever to become a political party, might still be avoided, Salye continued. She said it depends on the radicals’ showing in leadership elections and its influence over an action program at the movement’s annual convention in September.

“We do not insist on withdrawing from the movement,” Salye said, “but we hope that the radical wing will win at the next congress.”

But Telman Gdlyan, an anti-corruption campaigner who has now formed his own political party, contended that Democratic Russia, after supporting Yeltsin through the transition from communism, has completed its task and should yield its leadership role to ideologically based parties.

Serious differences also emerged between the movement’s Moscow-based leadership and its provincial affiliates, more than 40 of which sided on Sunday with the radicals, effectively splitting the movement.

“The Muscovites have become drunk with power, with the authority of their leadership of the movement, with the privileges that flow from this,” a delegate from St. Petersburg said Sunday. “This is a perpetuation of one of the worst aspects of Soviet political centralization. . . .